A Child By Any Other Name: might have a harder time being taken seriously?Victoria has six post-it notes hanging above her desk:  Mateo, Nicolas, Tomas, Alejandro, Santiago, and Simon.  I have one:  Nikolai.  

I love the name Nikolai.  This morning, I woke up thinking:  We can call our boy Niko.  

When I mentioned Nikolai the first time, four and a half months ago, when we found out Victoria was pregnant, she said, “Too Russian.”

I said, “What ya got against Russians?”

She said, “You just like it because it’s YOUR heritage.”   

I’m half Romanian, one quarter Russian and another quarter Ukranian, but The Ukraine may have been Russia when my great grandmother was born there.  So maybe I’m half Russian.  

I said, “I don’t feel Russian.”

She said, “I want my child to have a Latin name.  I want him to have a Latin identity.”  And then I got it.

Victoria lives in America, but she’s Venezuelan, so she feels like she has to hold on to her culture or it will get washed away.  Her extended family is still in Venezuela while mine is here.  We inevitably spend much more time with my family.  At home, we speak Spanish at dinner, but we speak English at breakfast and at lunch.  We also go to synagogue on occasion and except for the one time Victoria took Tashi to church; in our house, my cultures are ahead three to one.  

She also wants our boy to play in both worlds.  She wants him to be successful and thinks he’ll have to fight to be taken seriously by Latins if his name is Nikolai.

“Who cares what they think?”  I said. “Look at Barack, his name is Arabic or Swahili and he’s doing just fine here in the US.”

“That’s true,” she said, “but he’s taken shit for it.  And he’s not Latin.”


Today, for some reason, I was back on the Niko train and thought I'd try again.  ”Nikolai sounds Latin, to me,” I said.  It sounds a little Russian, I see that but also Italian and Portuguese and Latin.  

Victoria sighed.  

Then even before brushing my teeth, I ran to my computer to google “Latinos named Nikolai.” I found Nikolai Garcia, Nikolai Guerra, Nikolai de Lyra,…

I ran back to Victoria and told her my findings.  

She said, “Try googling Latinos named Jefferson.”

“I see your point. But Niko is so cute.”

“Then let’s do Nicolas.”

“Too Christian,” I said.

Andrea Askowitz, author of My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Lucky you!

 

Pope Benedict XVI recently decided to reformulate the Catholic Church's traditional Good Friday prayers, which apparently have repeated references to the “darkness” and “blindness” of Jews. According to the Jerusalem Post:

Pope Benedict XVI: pissin off the Yids

The Latin prayers for Good Friday ask Catholics to "pray also for the Jews that the Lord our God may take the veil from their hearts and that they also may acknowledge Our Lord Jesus Christ," and ask God not to "refuse your mercy even to the Jews; hear the prayers which we offer for the blindness of that people so that they may acknowledge the light of your truth, which is Christ, and be delivered from their darkness."

The move upset Jewish leaders, and prompted the Chief Rabbinate [of the UK] to write to the pope expressing their concern.

Abraham H. Foxman, US director of the Anti-Defamation League, said then he was "extremely disappointed and deeply offended" by the reintroduction of "insulting anti-Jewish language" that would "now permit Catholics to utter such hurtful and insulting words."

Jewcy isn’t exactly Foxman’s biggest fan, but he’s making a reasonable degree of sense here.

The Pope recently released the revised version of the prayer, but Jewish leaders still weren’t pleased.
Reuters:

Cardinal Walter Kasper spoke in an interview in a leading Italian newspaper a day after world Jewish leaders said the new prayer could set back inter-religious dialogue by decades.

"I must say that I don't understand why Jews cannot accept that we can make use of our freedom to formulate our prayers," Kasper, a German, told the Corriere della Sera.

Jews criticized the new version because it still says they should recognize Jesus Christ as the savior of all men. It asks that "all Israel may be saved" and keeps an underlying call to conversion that Jewish leaders had wanted omitted.

"We think that reasonably this prayer cannot be an obstacle to dialogue because it reflects the faith of the Church and, furthermore, Jews have prayers in their liturgical texts that we Catholics don't like," Kasper said.

I’m not a big fan of this particular prayer, but I do think Kasper has a point. We have fundamentally different religions. Our prayers should be free to recognize that.

With a decree he released “motu proprio”—that is, without the counsel of others—on Saturday, Pope Benedict XVI authorized a wider use of the old Catholic rite known as the Tridentine Mass. Officially abandoned in 1970, this traditional service is conducted by a priest who faces away from the congregation and mumbles the prayers in Latin. With this decree, Benedict, like the Tridentine priest, has turned his back once again on the modern Church, to sayMumbling The Prayers in Latin: The Tridentine Mass is back nothing of the modern world. The apologetic Catholic in me is constantly trying to defend ...